30 June 2009

Imperial Beach is basically the southwestern-most community shore in the contiguous United States, right to the north of the Tijuana River estuary on the southwest edge of San Diego County.

There is a pier, an old-school sea shell shop, and the sands are crowded with multiethnic families, chilled-out cholos, and crews of gangster-ish and red-faced skater-surfers, seemingly proud to be calling this their turf. Every summer a major sand sculpture festival happens here.

With easy access to parking and an extra-heavy dose of that laid-back Southern Cali feel, IB is also an ideal place to dip into the Pacific and lie away a few hours on a vacationy sort of Sunday afternoon.

29 June 2009

The world watched with awe and horror at massive demonstrations in opposition to the results of Iran's presidential elections this month, and paramilitaries' deadly crackdowns. But the modern world's attention span is severely screwed. Two weeks later, a mood of melancholy is enveloping normally frenetic Tehran, reported the NYT over the weekend. Although a smaller demonstration occurred Sunday, the opposition's options are dwindling fast.

Here's how we can honor both tragedies: The above video mashing up Michael Jackson's protest anthem "They Don't Care About Us" with images from the Iran unrest. (Pop-meta-meltdown once more, albeit with that awful "Jew me, Sue me" lyric still floating in there.)

"Freedom is near," the video says, "Don't give up." Could it be? From one of the many forwarded dispatches sent to me from inside Iran:

There is the possibility that those imprisoned remain there, that
Moussavi is done away with by some means (exile, house arrest, etc),
and that Ahmadinejad remains the illegitimate president of an unlawful
dictatorship. If this happens, the next four years would mean major
organizing in the underground and a new stage in Iranian political
activism. One thing is sure: people are no longer going to accept the
self-censorship or fear that has been imposed upon them.

28 June 2009

In case you missed it, here is my conversation "in the green room" with Swati Pandey of Zocalo and a link to a summary and video of my lecture last week in L.A. It was held before a packed house at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown, and people had wonderful and thoughtful questions. The whole thing was such an honor, and such fun. Thanks for coming through.

* ALSO: Here is the Zocalo wrap of the event the following night with Arturo Sarukhán, Mexico's ambassador to Washington. Sarukhán apparently joked that Barack Obama and Felipe Calderón are similar because "They're both lefties, both their wives are lawyers, and they got married the same year."

Um, Felipe Calderón is far, far from beinganywhere near a lefty. I wonder if Sarukhán was merely willing to gamble that most people in the audience wouldn't pick up on that. Sarukhán was an appointee of conservative Vicente Fox and actually left Mexico's foreign service to campaign for Calderón in the highly contested 2006 elections.

27 June 2009

Depicting a true gangster's dilemma -- getting locked up and then cut off by your moms -- here is Southeast San Diego and former Def Jam rapper Jayo Felony doing his "The Loc is On His Own." Listen close to the well-woven rhymes; the video starts 20 seconds into it.

Check this fan site and this interview for more. "Jayo Felony is somethin' I created when I was in Juvenile
Hall as a 14 to 15 year old seein' the word felony carved in a desk," the rapper says. "It just
stuck with me. Jayo stands for Justice Against Y'all Oppressors. Just a
little bit of science behind it."

24 June 2009

Above, view from the floor of California Plaza up to the towers of Grand Avenue, shimmering as always. I've had a great but busy time in Los Angeles so far, seeing friends, reconnecting with people, enjoying the hospitality.

Reminder to Intersections readers: I'm speaking Thursday night at MOCA as part of the Zocalo Public Lecture Series. If you plan on attending, it's a good idea to go to the site and make free reservations. Friends and I are thinking of putting together a late after-party somewhere; stay tuned at my Twitter feed for the info.

23 June 2009

Could something be changing? Could the standard two-year (or three- or four- or five-year...) gap that separates U.S. or European cultural trends and their arrival to Mexico be radically shrinking?

The evidence is with the arrival in Mexico City of the tektonic subculture, from the immigrant suburbs of France, and so soon after its birth. As we've blogged before here and here, tektonic is a dance-based movement that updates the formerly dormant rave and techno scene with this jerky, pop-locking style.

There are now several distinct tektonic tribes claiming public space in D.F., such as this banda that gets together to practice their moves at the Hemiciclo de Juarez on the Alameda Central. They told me they all met on Hi5 and MySpace, investigated tektonic on the Internet, and appeared to have an impressively sophisticated grasp of the roots and nature of their chosen tribe. None of them were over 18.

19 June 2009

Tijuana-San Diego street artist Acamonchi has a show up in the heart of D.F. right now, at the Upper Playground outpost in Condesa, and we caught it before taking off to California. His work is defined by a frenetic layering of icons and textures from the urban landscape.

18 June 2009

In Southern California we have the tainguis and mercado too, only here we call them swap meets, and they aren't as crowded with humans as markets can be in Mexico. Here is a view of the Spring Valley swap meet in the southeast region of San Diego. Picked up five crisp and bright T-shirts for $10 dollars. Not bad.

16 June 2009

Marco "ERRE" Remirez has pulled out of a planned retrospective of his work at Tijuana's CECUT, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported on Sunday. The move was the latest salvo in an ongoing debate among the arts community in TJ over the appointment of the (federal) center's new director, Virgilio Muñoz. Sandra Dibble has details, suggesting the dispute reflects the scene's growing maturity.

ERRE's retrospective would have been a milestone on several levels, and would have traveled to Mexico City. Mike Davis was preparing a text for the catalogue. Now the show's future is uncertain, but let's hope it lands somewhere. ERRE is the most prominent contemporary artist working in Tijuana, famed for his "Trojan Horse" installation at the San Ysidro international border crossing during inSITE '97, seen above.

13 June 2009

We drove around my dad's old hood, Tijuana's historic Colonia Libertad, right against the U.S.-Mexico international border fence on the dry hills of the city's east side.

Saw my abuelita's old hill-top house, where I personally spent so many weekends as a kid, just me and Esperanza. Who knows who lives there now. Dad pointed out all the old barbershops and the abandoned theater, near where the Opera Festival now happens.

12 June 2009

Six hours after leaving the bustle and midday heat of the center of Mexico City, with three hours of soaring through the high blue atmosphere above Mexico, I found myself on the bleachers of Cougar Stadium at the very new San Ysidro High School, facing a breathtaking sight.

The wide golden Pacific on the horizon in front of us, the crumpled beauty of Tijuana to the south, that red sunset, everything in view for hundreds of cheering friends and relatives. Representing: TJ people, South Bay people, Pinoy San Diego, African American San Diego.

Sharp ocean breezes.

A cousin I haven't seen since he was a kid was graduating. I was given video-camera duty. Wild hollers, noise-blowers. The principal talked tough, and people listened. But the families ignored pleas to stay in their seats during the recessional, rushing out to meet their graduates at the gates. There were photos to take.

By nightfall, tables were hard to come by at all the South Bay franchises of Hometown Buffet.

06 June 2009

This is the view from my old apartment complex nestled into a verdant hill on the east side of Echo Park Lake, in what is technically known as Angelino Heights, Los Angeles. I'll be lurking around those sloping streets again in a couple weeks. There, and maybe Koreatown, Pasadena, downtown, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, Boyle Heights, and Long Beach?

05 June 2009

Contempo, a Mexico City modeling agency, closed DFashion last night with a special anniversary show featuring work by many of the city's young designers: EGR, Te Amo, Denise Marchebout, Carlos Temores, Mancandy, Marvin y Quetzal, Trista, Malafacha, and others.

It was a packed event. Rafa Cuevas of Te Amo DJ'd during the runway presentation and for the after-party, which went on until ... until way way too late. Above, Rafa and Zemmoa. And here, an intriguing art-fashion-music video they did together in 2007.

04 June 2009

Here's a guy I met briefly months ago at a ska-reggae toquin at the totally autonomous Auditorio Che Guevara, at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters on the UNAM campus. The auditorium was "taken" during the student strike of 1999 and has not been relinquished to university authorities ever since. Students hold concerts, meetings, and art events there. The mood inside is always classically punk.

Incidentally, a known drug dealer was shot and killed near this very campus spot on Tuesday, in a rare incident of fatal violence at University City. Just on Sunday, the entire university community and city at large was celebrating their Pumas winning the national football championship, their sixth overall.

Tuesday's shooting victim had a long criminal record and was not a student. But, what happened?

03 June 2009

The left-leaning daily La Jornada conducted an informal poll of 914 current Twitter users in Mexico to see how the country's political parties will fare in the upcoming mid-term legislative election, on July 5. Querying its Twitter followers, the paper's poll found that right-wing or center-right parties (the cool colors), led by the president's PAN, garnered 33% of users' support. Left-wing or center-left parties (the warm colors), led by the PRD and Convergencia, got the majority remainder.

But the truth is you can't read this or any poll in a traditional left-right political binary without taking into account the curious position of the PRI. That party ruled the country pretty much unopposed for more than 70 years, until the 2000 election. They're not exactly the paragons of democracy -- nevermind the Revolution. (Wait, whatever happened to the Revolution?) La Jornada, on its own Twitter profile, identifies the PRI among the conservatives. (Guess that's what happened to the Revolution.)

Yet in poll after poll, the PRI is expected to be the big winner on July 5, signalling an imminent twilight zone between this summer and the crucial presidential election in 2012, when the PRI's candidate -- whomever, ahem, he is -- will be the man to beat.

02 June 2009

View of the northern reaches of the Distrito Federal from the top of the Torre Latinoamericana, just before the start of a heavy, psychedelic thunderstorm, 28 May, 2009. We watched bolts pierce the night sky for hours, landing upon identifiable districts: Cuatro Caminos to the northwest, Chalco to the northeast, and enormous, violent rays of light striking land right below us in the Guerrero ...

01 June 2009

* Above, Mexico City youth in resistance, on the 40th anniversary of 1968.

After a full year in exile, in forced total-immersion in Mexico, I'll be back in my native California later this month. I plan to see family in San Diego (and hopefully by then greet a new nephew), attend a wedding in L.A., and speak at the invitation of the Zócalo public lecture series, a wonderful civic institution in Los Angeles. The invite is such an honor.

Swine flu, a contracting economy, rising unemployment, a wild and
bloody conflict with drug traffickers, the constant threat of natural
disasters and ransom kidnappings — Mexico faces several serious
challenges. Since the contested 2006 presidential election there, the
country has suffered crisis after crisis, constantly testing the
Mexican people's ability to realign their everyday lives. Some seek
economic refuge in the United States, but most remain home, adapting,
tuning out, dancing with Death. Daniel Hernandez, a former Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly writer
who has spent the past 18 months blogging Mexico City, visits Zócalo to
share his insights on that sprawling capital, its youth culture, and
the alternately defiant and detached, resigned and resistant approaches
of Mexican people to threats always looming.

For the talk, I'll keep it loose and simple, and probably bring up themes I'm tackling in my upcoming book.

But I'd like to envision a different kind of dynamic for this lecture. Bring the kids. There are few things I enjoy more than speaking about my work to audiences of young people. I am constantly amazed by the sophistication of their thinking, by their ability to quickly synthesize new information and challenge assumptions.

So if you're around and can encourage teens and students to stop in at MOCA on the evening of June 25, please, by all means, do. The event is free -- and I promise not to bore you.